June 27, 2006

Improved Access to Fiction

Juli Beall, the second speaker at Saturday's Dewey Breakfast/Update at the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans, reported on research she and Diane Vizine-Goetz (OCLC Office of Research) are doing on use of the DDC to expand the coverage of FictionFinder to help people interested in looking for a good story. In her presentation "Using Dewey to Improve Access to Fiction," Juli demonstrated how the DDC can be used to find fiction in the broad sense of the term--"stories of imagined events, e.g., novels, short stories, fairy tales, fables, films, comics, interactive fiction." Right now, FictionFinder uses the MARC coding for fiction in existing catalog records, thus limiting retrieval to fiction in the narrow sense of novels and short stories. Juli and Diane are experimenting with adding the following Dewey numbers (and selected subdivisions) to increase retrieval of fiction in the broad sense: 741.5 Comic books, graphic novels, fotonovelas, cartoons, caricatures, comic strips; 741.43 Motion pictures; and 741.45 Television.

So what do Pride and Prejudice and Fantastic Four have in common (we asked this question in the Dewey Breakfast/Update announcement)? Both are works of fiction in the broad sense, in that they appear in multiple formats. Pride and Prejudice began as a textual novel, but also has television and film representations. Fantastic Four started as a comic book, but also has been novelized and made into a film.

December 2016

OCLC

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